
Author: Jack Inabinet, Source: Bankless, Compilation: Shaw, Bitchain Vision
Ethereum has just celebrated its tenth anniversary. To celebrate this milestone, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin was a guest on the Bankless podcast hosted by Ryan and David, which reviewed the development of Ethereum over the past decade and explored the future direction of the network.
The nearly two-hour interview was rich in content, full of bold predictions, candid reflections and philosophical insights.
ETH has real value
Although Vitalik is not always happy to talk about ETH prices, Ryan and David seem happy to hear Vitalik respond to questions about the value of ETH in the summary of this conversation.
For many cryptocurrency observers, the price of ETH is the adhesive that tightly connects the entire Ethereum ecosystem.In the interview, Vitalik seemed to acknowledge this, saying it was nice to see the Ethereum community unite around ETH and regard ETH as the economic center of Ethereum.
Similarly, when asked about Ethereum Treasury Reserves, Vitalik said they offer individuals a variety of ways to gain ETH investment exposure, adding that it is “helpful and valuable” to coordinate the holding of ETH on their balance sheet as part of their treasury.
Privacy: The next frontier area of Ethereum
Decentralization is Ethereum’s first major attempt, and privacy is likely to be its next goal.Vitalik invested a lot of time in this episode, elaborating on an ambitious and principled and practical privacy roadmap.
From wallets with default privacy to scalable, unmanaged privacy funds pools, Vitalik makes it clear that zero-knowledge encryption is key to making Ethereum fully private and implementing its crypto-punk philosophy.
In his vision, privacy is a freedom that should not be limited to purists or pirates, it must be constructed for the masses.To achieve this goal, Ethereum must adopt a model similar to the “Bronze Age mullet”, the front end must have an atmosphere and the back end must have policies, so as to achieve scalable privacy protection at the technical and cultural levels.
Ethereum L2 Barbell strategy is working
Although concerns about fragmentation of L2 networks are lingering in 2024, Vitalik still sticks to the Barbell strategy, claiming that the strategy keeps the Ethereum mainnet streamlined, neutral and highly secure, while giving L2 networks room to experiment with scalability, user experience and alternative block generation processes.
Rather than treating L2 as direct competition or failure, Vitalik views it as a functional separation of responsibilities, L2 actively optimizes performance and meets the needs of average users, while L1 remains decentralized and acts as the ultimate authoritative source.
Although Vitalik highlights the need to speed up withdrawals, increase sharded space fees and increase ETH-denominated assets, he believes that further development of L2 will make Ethereum a growing center of gravity, allowing them to continue to revolve around it.